Category Physics

This 3D map illustrates the large-scale distribution of dark matter, reconstructed from measurements of weak gravitational lensing by using the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: Image courtesy of DOE/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Lattice Strong Dynamics Collaboration, led by a Lawrence Livermore National Lab team, has combined theoretical and computational physics techniques and used the Laboratory’s massively parallel 2-petaflop Vulcan supercomputer to devise a new model of dark matter. It identifies it as naturally “stealthy” today, but would have been easy to see via interactions with ordinary matter in the extremely high-temperature plasma conditions that pervaded the early universe.

Dark matter makes up 83% of all matter in the universe and does not interact directly with elect...

This discovery opens up a new class of materials for scientists working on ‘skyrmionics,’ which aims to build memory and logic devices based on skyrmions (tiny magnetic vortices). The field of skyrmionics has developed rapidly over the last few years. The very small (around 10 nm) magnetic vortices could provide a new way to build memory and logical devices with a very low energy use. ‘In fact, a computer memory system based on magnetic bubbles, which are basically very large skyrmions, was invented in the 1967 at Bell Labs’, explains Maxim Mostovoy, Associate Prof of Theoretical Physics at the University of Groningen...

The ‘just right’ structure that emerges when you drive a system containing light and matter (like the universe), neither too fast nor too slow across a quantum phase transition. It illustrates the findings of the study titled “Enhanced dynamic light-matter entanglement from driving neither too fast nor too slow,” published in the journal Physical Review. Credit: Oscar Acevedo, Universidad de los Andes, and Neil Johnson, University of Miami. The study is a collaboration between the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia and the University of Miami.

By studying a system that couples matter and light together, like the universe, researchers have found crossing a quantum phase transition at intermediate speeds generates the richest, most complex structure...

All-optical data memory: ultra-short light pulses make the GST material change from crystalline to amorphous and back. Weak light pulses read out the data. Credit: C. Rios/Oxford University

Researchers develop the first non-volatile all-optical chip memory based on phase change materials. This is an important step on the way towards optical computers. Phase change materials that change their optical properties depending on the arrangement of the atoms allow for the storage of several bits in a single cell.

Light determines the future of information and communication technology: With optical elements, computers can work more rapidly and more efficiently. Optical fibers have long since been used for the transmission of data with light...